[4] The document is very poorly preserved and has suffered considerable damage to the page edges, resulting in the loss of some of the text.

The codex largely relates to a cycle of thirteen 20-year kʼatuns and includes details of Maya astronomical signs.

In spite of the poor state of preservation of the document, enough text has survived to demonstrate that in the case of the Paris Codex, the main series of dates correspond to kʼatun-endings, allowing for the reconstruction of some of the lost date glyphs in the text.

[1] The reverse of the codex is more varied in nature and includes a section dedicated to a calendrical cycle ruled by Chaac, the god of rain.

The final two pages of the codex depict a series of thirteen animals that represent the so-called "zodiac".

[18] The codex had apparently been examined some twenty-five years earlier by scholars and had been catalogued but it is not known how the document found its way to Paris.